There is no doubt that Woody Allen wholeheartedly loves New York City, but his attempt to illustrate the city in a Fellini-like fashion results in making the city look touristy. Seemingly the film has influenced the younger generation of New York based filmmakers and even they have made homage to this film (i.e., Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise similarly consists of well-composed medium shots and has a resembling scene of four persons sitting in a theatre. Also, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It features analogous landscape montages and has an akin scene of the protagonist running to meet his lover). Ironically, these youngsters present the city in more genuine manners and give Allen's Manhattan an obsolete look.
Though the portrait of immature middle-aged people who can't deal with their relationships might be real, who wants to see that? Especially, Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) soliciting his former 17-year-old lover Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) not to leave for London, after discovering his other relationship doesn't work, is unbearable to watch. All central characters, maybe except 17-year-old Tracy, have the same typical-Allen-like personas in their ways of thinking and behaving--Allen might have a dictatorship as a director and it causes the lack of the characters' diversity. The screenplay contains many cliches (i.e., Allen's voiceover monologue on the opening montage to depict the city as a book's Chapter One, several pseudo-intellectual lines such as Isaac's describing his friends as "pseudo-intellectual garbage" talking about "existential reality," Isaac's line "Trouble is my middle name" after his prospective lover says she's troublesome, and so on). Cinematography by Gordon Willis is inappropriately beautiful; the gap between the aesthetic visual and the half-grown content generates an uncompelling, halfway style.
67 out of 117 found this helpful